Before Mila Kunis and Aston Kutcher made us believe in love again, and before Macaulay Culkin changed his life around by marrying Brenda Song and having a baby, Kunis and Culkin were in a relationship of their own.
Kunis and Culkin's relationship is one celebrity relationship we always forget happened. We tend to forget that they dated for nearly a decade and that their relationship was relatively low-key until it ended in 2011. Shortly after, Kunis fell in love with Kutcher, her That '70s Show co-star, following Kutcher's separation from his wife, Demi Moore.
Both Kunis and Culkin are happy now, but does Kunis regret ever having a relationship with the Home Alone actor?
They Started Dating In 2002
Kunis and Culkin started dating in 2002, and they were able to keep the details of their relationship relatively secret for the most part, surprisingly. We don't even know how they first met, but we know that they linked up around the time Kunis was 18 and Culkin was 21.
Since they were so young when they first dated, Kunis told Women's Health, "We grew up together. You find a steady rock in your life, and that’s all you need. We have our ups and downs, but work through them."
Even though Culkin was her "steady rock," it was hard for them to see each other with their careers, plus Kunis lived in Los Angeles, and Culkin lived in New York City at the time.
The press were also all over Culkin during this time due to his fame as a child star. So the couple definitely felt the strain from the paparazzi.
When they called it quits in 2011, it was thought to be amicable. Kunis later talked about her relationship with Culkin to Howard Stern in 2016 and said that all the media attention was crazy.
"He was huge. You couldn’t walk down the street with him," she said. "He always had this weird attraction, like fans just screamed when they saw him! They didn’t know how to react. It wasn’t like a normal response to a celebrity. Fans responded in a very abnormal way to him."
But all the weird attention wasn't the only thing that ruined the couple's relationship.
Their Relationship Actually Ended Badly And Kunis Regrets It
Kunis gave even more detail about how things ended between her and Culkin when she sat down to talk with Dax Shepard on his podcast, Armchair Expert. She described her breakup from Macaulay as "horrible."
"I f**ked up," she said. "I was an a** in my 20s, and I’ll be the first to admit it. And that’s something that took me a long time to come out and be like, 'Yeah, you know what, I was a d**k,' and accept it, and I own it now."
She didn't go into how she messed things up with Culkin but continued, "And it’s f**ked up what I did, and it’s f**ked up how I did it. When I got to be single, I said, 'I just need to figure myself out.' I genuinely need to know why I did what I did and, like, regroup myself as a human being."
Shepard asked if she’d forgiven herself. She said, "You know, it’s been so long like I feel like enough time has gone by." She also said there was no bad blood between her and Culkin now. "I think enough mutual friends have been like, everybody kind of forgave everybody for what went down."
These comments made fans think that Kunis must have cheated on Culkin, especially when other rumors suggested that Kutcher had cheated on Moore with Kunis. But neither of the rumors have any evidence, and it doesn't look like either relationship overlapped with Kunis and Kutcher's.
During this time, there were also rumors that Culkin had not taken the breakup well. Some speculated that he looked unhealthy and blamed the end of the relationship. Sources also claimed Kunis had reached out to Culkin, begging him to get help. Ultimately, we don't know how much any of this is true.
But it doesn't look like Kunis regrets her and Culkin's relationship at all. In fact, it seems as if they had a great relationship, and it was great for what it was at the time. They needed and helped each other growing up into the business, but they weren't meant to go any further. Kunis's only regret about the relationship is how it ended and her "horrible" part in it, whatever happened.
They both turned out okay after the fact, though, which is what counts. They have their own families, and there's no animosity between them. However, we're dying to know how it truly ended between them.